TITLE: Executive chef/owner of Wildflower Café in Mason
HOMETOWN: Fairfield
WHY WE LOVE HIM: Because he proves the ’burbs can be cool and because his delicious farm-to-table food makes the drive outside the 275 loop worth it.
The same exit off Interstate 71 that will take you to both Kings Island
and The Beach Waterpark probably isn’t anyone’s first instinct as to where to go to find a fresh, sustainable local meal. But for chef Todd Hudson, Mason was a natural choice for his first restaurant, housed in a converted century-old farmhouse on a halcyon drag of Main Street.
“I wanted to be in kind of an older setting, particularly in an older downtown,” Hudson says.
In fact, when Hudson first bought the restaurant, he literally lived in the building.“(Mason) is great because it’s not 22-year-old hipsters and it’s not 80-year-old millionaires,” he says. “It’s somewhere in between.”
“It’s got it’s own unique (thing),” he continues. “Everyone knows it used to be a farming town, and those people are still there. It has that old nostalgia to it. …I’ve run restaurants all over, and this is definitely the best crowd of customers I’ve ever had.”
Wildflower’s menu rotates frequently to incorporate the freshest ingredients, some of which Hudson even grows himself in the restaurant’s on-site greenhouse. He credits his family for his interest both in the culinary world and in sustainably grown ingredients. Growing up, Hudson’s dad was a chiropractor, a discipline that emphasizes nutrition and organic food. “We always had gardens,” he says. “I didn’t realize that the rest of the world didn’t eat that way.”
On top of that, his great-grandmother owned a restaurant where his grandfather was the chef and his grandmother ran front of house; his other set of grandparents were farmers. “So between restaurant grandparents, farmer grandparents and chiropractor dad, it’s always just been in my blood,” Hudson says.
After getting a degree in business management from Miami University, Hudson planned to go to culinary school, but by the time graduation came around, he already had a kitchen management job, so he “rolled with that,” he says.
“I’ve always debated whether I prefer being a chef or a GM,” he says. “I still do to this day. I like both parts of it quite a bit.”
He recalls a time in the late ’90s when he was working at a restaurant surrounded by farms, but the chef would still send him to the grocery store for tomatoes in July and August. “I was like, dude, there are farms all around here!” Hudson says. “And then I’d go to (the store) and buy these big tomatoes that were as hard as rocks, and it was just silly.”
“Everyone was just buying garbage product,” he says. “Imported frozen fish, pre-cut, vacuum-sealed. I call it the Applebee’s mentality. And I realized it was a crock.”
What do you love most about your job?
I get to be around people. Generally speaking, my staff all gets along, they live together, they hang out together, and I’m in that same boat. We’ve got a killer staff, my customers are super nice, and it’s just nice to be around those kinds of people.
What do you love most about the farm-to-table movement?
In our particular farm-to-table world, we’re not cheating people, we’re not lying to them or hiding where we acquire (ingredients). It’s a super honest business.
Motto that you try to live your life by?
Probably the golden rule: Treat others the way you want to be treated.
Best lesson life has taught you about love?
I think that love is really the whole meaning of what we’re doing here. I feel bad for people who don’t get to experience that on a regular basis. When it’s all said and done, and we pass, that’s what you have to give. You’re not going to take your money, and you’re not going to take you car — you leave a legacy of love. And there’s a lot of badass dudes and badass women that do that.
Learn more about WILDFLOWER CAFÉ at wildflowergourmetcafe.com.
This article appears in Feb 10-17, 2016.